"One third of ordinary Australian women choose to have a termination and those women are not criminals," Ramsay, who specialises in gynaecological ultrasounds and prenatal diagnosis, told BuzzFeed News.

"[Doctors] have been working around and dodging the law and manipulating things so that our patients get the care they need, but we are all aware that officially abortion is illegal and it is talked about in hushed tones.

Every 9 minutes a woman dies needlessly as a result of this illegal process

Okun Oliech
Sun 30th Apr 2017

Induced abortion is one of the most performed medical interventions in the world. Abortions will always be necessary as a backup even when women use several forms of contraception. Even when using the best methods such as the contraceptive pill or a condom, the chance of failure is 2% each year.

A significant amount of women will most likely face unwanted pregnancy and will provoke an abortion themselves or go to a person without medical training, increasing health risks and the risk of hospitalisation due to complications.

'Kiss me, Frank, I'm going': A century ago, abortion was on trial in Canada's capital

Megan Gillis, Postmedia
Published on: April 29, 2017

On any given day outside Ottawa’s best-known abortion clinic, protesters carry placards bearing pictures of bloody and dismembered fetuses. But in the Ottawa of 100 years ago, abortion was killing and maiming women. It was a desperate gamble that many were nonetheless willing to take, Megan Gillis writes.

Pregnant and single, the 24-year-old waitress at a Sparks Street lunch counter said she’d drown herself in the Rideau Canal if Annie Balcomb didn’t agree to help her.

Emily Cornick got her abortion but died anyway, weeping to her sister as she succumbed to peritonitis, “I’m going to die. I am sorry I came here. Oh, what will Mother say?”

At the moment, the idea of over-the-counter access to medication abortion in the United States sounds crazy. But preliminary data suggests it is safe

Friday 28 April 2017

The coat hanger – often with a red line through it – is a powerful feminist symbol. Conjuring images of women suffering unspeakable consequences of unsafe abortion, the coat hanger sends a foreboding message about a past we must not return to. The implications are clear: abortions women give themselves when they cannot access legal services are dangerous.

While the coat hanger rhetoric has been useful for the abortion rights movement, it has become problematic in the 21st century. Coat hangers are no longer the method of choice for women who want to end a pregnancy on their own. In my research in Texas, women much more commonly report using medications or herbs when they try to self-induce an abortion. Some of these medications are very safe and effective, while the problem with herbs is that they are often ineffective.

The Law, Trials and Imprisonment for Abortion in Kenya
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28 April 2017
International Campaign for Women's Right to Safe Abortion

Photo credit: KELIN A photo taken from the 2016 #Justice2Health forum

by Alice E Finden

This report summarises the law and policy on abortion in Kenya and cases of trials and imprisonment for abortion between 2004 and 2017.

“Laws that criminalise abortion but without concomitantly articulating clearly the grounds for lawful abortion… unduly deter healthcare providers from providing health services to women even where abortion is lawful. Equally, such laws create misperceptions about abortion as conduct that is criminal at all times.” (Charles Ngwena) [1]

The above quote sums up perfectly the unresolved state of abortion law in Kenya, and the resulting limited access to safe abortion in the country. Abortion is spoken to by the 1970 Penal Code which criminalises it, and the 2010 Constitution which makes exceptions to this criminalisation. The lack of clarity and transparency with regard to the circumstances in which abortion is legal greatly contributes to Kenya’s high maternal mortality ratio from complications of unsafe abortion.

GENEVA (28 April 2017) – Honduras must allow wider scope for legal abortions in new legislation due to be put to the country’s parliament, so that women and girls can enjoy their full human rights to sexual and reproductive health, UN experts* have urged.

A Consultative Commission in Honduras is currently finalising its opinion on a reform of the penal code which the Congress will subsequently vote in plenary in the near future.

Road to abortion referendum will be long and arduousOur parliament is not set up for the quick end to the abortion debate that is needed

Fri, Apr 28, 2017, 01:03
Oliver Callan

The emphatic vote of the Citizens’ Assembly and opinion polls show there is compelling support for liberalising our abortion laws. Sadly for the hours campaigners have spent on the matter, there is little appetite in so-called “New Politics” to do anything about it.

Trump officials say the UN supports coercive abortion in China. But does it?

April 28, 2017
By Christina Asquith

In slashing $32 million of funding to the United Nations Populations Fund, also known as the UNFPA, earlier this month, the Trump administration slung a decade-old nefarious charge: The agency supports the coercive abortion of Chinese female fetuses.

To many in China, this came as a surprise.

“We regret this decision because the UNFPA was not helping Chinese women get abortions,” said Mengjun Tang, a Beijing-based fellow with the China Population and Development Research Center and who has worked with the UN. “UNFPA was helping to make sure women were not being pressured to have an abortion.”

Charmaine Yoest was head of Americans United for Life, which played role in recent wave of anti-abortion laws by feeding model bills to state lawmakers

Molly Redden in New York
Friday 28 April 2017

Donald Trump has appointed the former president of a leading anti-abortion group to the top communications role at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHSS).

Charmaine Yoest, who for several years was head of Americans United for Life (AUL), will be HHS assistant secretary for public affairs. AUL played an instrumental role in the recent wave of anti-abortion laws by feeding model legislation to state lawmakers.

This New Site Aims to Make It Safer to Have an Abortion at Home
"If we truly believe in women’s self-determination, they should also have a choice in how."

By Jill Filipovic
Apr 27, 2017

No one knows exactly how many women in the United States induce their own abortions every year, but we do know that, despite abortion being legal, a number of women take matters into their own hands. In the United States, women self-managing their own abortions — whether because they can’t access or afford a legal abortion in a clinic, because of feelings of fear or shame, or because they simply prefer the privacy of ending a pregnancy themselves — have long relied on word of mouth, Google, or their own instincts to figure out what to do and whether something has gone wrong.

That’s what Women Help Women wants to change. The organization just launched a new website that offers personalized information for women seeking to end early pregnancies with misoprostol, an abortion-inducing medication.